


Ageless Thing

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2009 [13]
Category: Doctor Who, Highlander: The Series
Genre: Chance Meetings, Gen, Immortality, Introspection, lying, old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 09:05:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5122619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He lies about his age.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ageless Thing

**Author's Note:**

> FaithLestrange requested Doctor Who/Highlander Doctor/Methos, _Lying about your age_ \- Gave me a headache, the prompt did. And then it went sideways. I’m not happy, but it’s not getting any better. Sorry.
> 
> 2009 repost.

+

The first time the Doctor runs into Methos, he’s wearing little more than rags, stealing and scavenging at the edge of what will one day – if he’s not completely off – become the Sahara. But the invention of that word is a long way off.

He meets the man called Methos and something about him is different. Warped. Time flows around him, not through him, although remains of it linger inside of him. Touched by time, once upon a time, but not now. 

How? 

All living things are time’s children. As are all the dead.

“What are you?” 

The other man looks up from where he’s crouching near his pack and primitive weapons, looking angry, a cornered animal. The Doctor keeps his hands by his sides, lookie, nothing here to kill you with.

“I am an immortal.” Weeell, the words he actually uses before the Tardis’s translator gets to them is ‘one who can’t die’, but that’s just semantics. The Doctor gapes.

“That’s impossible.”

The other man – the _immortal_ shrugs and starts backing away, probably wondering why he told the freak in the suit in the first place.

“Nonono, hold on. I believe you. I’ve just never met one of your kind before.” Methos relaxes and the Doctor’s more cat-like tendencies take over. “How old are? Were you born? Where are you from? What happens when you get injured? I mean, do you heal instantly, because living forever with gaping wounds? That would… suck.”

“I don’t remember,” the strange man says, answering only the first question, his eyes hooded, careful. 

He’s lying but his weapons are deadly despite being blunt and so the Doctor lets him get away with it. 

Later, years and years and years later, they find each other in Venice at the height of its glory. The Time Lord is in awe of the immortal who lived, in linear time, from the dawn of man to the early modern age. How many thousand years? He doesn’t dare ask because there is a look in Methos’s eyes, a look that not even the oldest of Time Lords have ever had.

There is such a thing as too much time.

So they go out, find wine and amusement and tell each other meaningless stories about foreign ages and planets. It’s kind of nice, to have someone to talk to without holding anything back. No secrets between them. 

Later that night they run into another of Methos’s kind, a young and eager one. He asks, “How old are you?”

And Methos – going by Marius then – answers, “About five hundred. You?”

The youngling is awestruck by the seemingly eternal stretch of five centuries and once more, the Doctor lets the lie go. What does he care? 

After that night of drunken revelry, the traveler makes a point of finding his somewhat friend at least once a century. Sometimes they have fun, sometimes they run for their lives. Twice, the Doctor can only watch as Methos is killed and then try to steal the body before a witch hunt breaks out. Once he succeeds, once he fails and they escape only with the Tardis’s help. Methos stays on board for a while and every time he tells his story, the same question comes. 

And every time, the answer is a lie. 

It’s the late twentieth century when the Doctor has enough. He wades into his ship’s logs and finds the date of their first meeting before setting the computers to work on calculating the time that has passed since then, through dozens of calendars and ages. 

Armed with that number, he goes to visit his friend and finds him in a dark bar, drinking beer with another of his kind. He sits with them, drinking expensive amber liquid that does nothing for him and listens. And, as always when immortals get together, the conversation invariably lands on the one subject they never run out of: The past. 

Eventually, the man with the ponytail – Mac, his name is Mac - tells of his first fight, shuddering at the faded, disjointed memory. Methos pats him on the back consolingly and confesses to not have much of a memory at all, of his first fight. After all, it’s been five thousand years. 

_Lie._

The Doctor opens his mouth, ready to finally stop this silly game that’s been going on for far too long, when Methos catches his eye, shakes his head, plea in his gaze. 

“Don’t,” he whispers, too low for Mac to hear, in a language long dead. “Don’t, old friend.”

The Time Lord looks at him, head tilted to one side, looks long and hard, the endless, enormous number of his friend’s true age rattling inside his head. 

“Why?” he asks, for the first time in however many thousand years.

Methos picks at the label of his beer bottle and says, “It’s better not to remember.”

That number inside his head, the Doctor realizes, is big for him. But for a human, it’s too big. Later, when he returns to his beloved ship, he stares at the results of his little calculation for a long time.

Then he deletes them and lets Methos go on playing this strange game of hide and seek with himself and all his past.

It’s better not to remember.

+


End file.
